The advent of digital technology means there are now more ways than ever to communicate. This increased ability to send and receive data significantly expands an organisation's ability to deliver information via the Internet and advanced printing and publishing systems. The combination of Web technologies and digital printing can reduce communication costs, help businesses acquire new customers, increase the loyalty and buying habits of current customers, enable new revenue opportunities, and give birth to new business models.
By gathering the right data and utilizing digital publishing an organisation can deliver information customized to their customer's wishes, when they need it. Consequently, it is no surprise that personalized, highly targeted collateral and direct marketing are widely accepted as key factors in achieving higher response rates, increased efficiencies, and improved marketing.
Digital publishing solutions enable real-time targeted marketing (RTTM) by enabling the ability to create, print on demand, and distribute marketing collateral such as brochures, presentations, direct mail and point of sale materials that are customised to each audience member in a cost effective manner. However, the value of RTTM extends beyond improved marketing response rates by helping reduce costs and drive incremental revenue.
Variable-data printing (VDP) is a form of on-demand printing in which all the documents in a print run are similar but not identical. A mail merge is a simple form of VDP. For example, personalized letters may have the same basic layout, but there will be a different name and address on each letter. Variable-data printing can now go far beyond printing different names and addresses on a document. There are systems that enable the user to insert different graphics into a document, change the layout and/or the number of pages, print a unique bar code on each document and more.
A prominent example of VDP usage is how credit-card companies analyze the buying histories of their customers and send information about specific products and services related to the ascertained customer interests. VDP systems are used to print these customized advertisements.
The concept of creating variable-data documents has also been extended to non-paper documents such as PDF documents and HTML documents. The term variable-data publishing (VDP) encompasses both paper documents and on-line documents.
Due to the resultant demands for the layout, content and personalisation of documents, high-volume print jobs are becoming more complex. In addition to this, pressure on the operators at the machines is increasing.
Personalized Print Markup Language (PPML) is the print industry's answer to these issues. PPML is a new, Extensible Markup Language (XML)-based, industry standard print language for variable data publishing (VDP). It enables high-speed, efficient printing and production of documents with reusable and variable content.
The PPML language uses XML, the Extensible Markup Language, as its syntactical base, giving it an affinity to many Web-based applications, and can access page content files generated in many different formats. Because PPML is independent of printer language, PPML can be used to create output that will support any printer language. Any PPML-compliant printer with the appropriate features will accept the same print file, no matter what software created it and what printer generates the output. Thus, applications will ultimately range from desktop to high-end digital printing presses.
In a PPML workflow, there is a PPML Producer and a PPML Consumer. A PPML Producer is anything that produces PPML code (typically an application or a driver). A PPML Consumer is a device, process, or system that reads and interprets PPML code (typically a printer or Digital Front End).
The generation of VDP collateral material for Digital Publishing requires the generation of templates addressing the support for variable content and dynamic layout. Consequently, there now exists a version of PPML for variable data called PPML/T. The ‘T’ part of PPML/FT corresponds to a template which is sent to the press where it can be merged with a database and a library of repeated elements to produce a PPML document.
A Theme is a concept that enables different versions of a document to be generated, for example documents in different languages. These themes are implemented using multiple templates, particularly if there are variations between the copy-hole layouts. To support a plurality of copy-holes it is necessary to provide alternative templates, each with a unique combination, and select among them at the time of merging the variable data to produce personalized documents. Thus, it is problematic to maintain consistency across all templates when a change needs to be made.
For example, if a logo needs to be replaced or slightly moved, the Graphic Artist (GA) needs to repeat this operation for all templates with the various combinations of copy-holes. Clearly, this will not scale when the number of copy-holes, and subsequent number of templates, is more than a few.
Prior solutions based on PPML/T can allow a copy-hole to be available or not, but those solutions are not based on the ‘Theme’ paradigm. Consequently, the GA has no control over the generation of the variants, since these are hand-coded within the exported format of PPML/T.